Rolled Into One

From James McGrath regarding the Japanese tsunami and whether or not God “did it for a reason.”

In my Sunday school class last week, the subject [of the Japanese earthquake] came up, and as we were up to Romans 1 in our study of that letter, we discussed what it means to think of God as in some sense plainly visible in the natural world. I emphasized that we cannot help but think differently than people did in bygone ages about these matters, and that theists should not simply have all the gods of polytheism, personifying forces of nature, rolled into one, but must find a way of acknowledging that things happen which simply ought not to be interpreted in terms of divine action or theological significance. If science offers anything helpful to religious thought, it is to free us from needing to interpret meaningless accidents and tragedies as though they are the acts of a malevolent deity who, although supposedly omnipotent, chooses to vent his frutrations using blunt, indiscriminate instruments of harm, fors [sic] of nature that seem perfectly capable of doing that on their own. Attributing them to supernatural agency is to make the tragic into something even worse.